Your health matters, and you should always seek out medical care when you think that you need it and when you’re at all concerned. However, medical care can come in all shapes and sizes, and choosing the right type of medical care can certainly be quite difficult indeed. For instance, when do you go to the emergency room and when do you avoid it?

Of course, you should always go to your local emergency room when you are having any kind of true medical emergency. If you are seriously injured, go to the emergency room. If you suspect a heart attack or stroke, go to the emergency room. If you fear you might be in preterm labor, you should absolutely go to the emergency room as well. But emergency rooms are often jam packed and crowded, meaning that those who are experiencing less life threatening medical distresses will often find themselves waiting for hours on end. And as such people are also going to end up stuck with a massive bill at the end of things, seeking care elsewhere is likely to be ideal.

Of course, you can go to your general care practitioner. In fact, the typical GP is even likely to see as many as 3,500 patients over the course of just one single year. In addition to this, a GP can refer you to a doctor who specializes in a certain area of medicine. If you are having persistent health concerns, this can be ideal. And specialists are becoming more and more accessible and commonplace, with the average specialist seeing more than 2,500 patients over the course of just one single year.

But what happens when your GP’s office is closed? For one thing, more and more doctors are working later shifts than ever before. In fact, nearly three quarters of all doctors in this country offer more than 30 full hours of direct care for patients on a weekly basis. In addition to this, nearly half of all doctors and their practices will be open for business during the evenings and even for some weekend hours. For those with an emergent problem or even for those who are not able to take time off during the week to go see the doctor, these present wonderful options.

The online doctor is also becoming more and more popular, and many an online doctor now operates, at least to some extent, on a daily basis. An online doctor can work through an established practice or outside of one, but it is also true that more people are willing to trust the advice of an online doctor and such on-demand care as a whole if they also have a relationship with that doctor in real life. In fact, more than half of all respondents to a recently conducted survey have stated that they would only use the services of an online doctor if they knew that doctor personally, such as if the online doctor in question was their GP or another doctor working in the practice.

Aside from the online doctor, convenient medical care can also typically be obtained from a 24 hour urgent care center. After all, there are now more than 7,000 urgent care centers found all throughout the country, a number that is only likely to keep growing in the years that are ahead of us. For many people, urgent care centers are ideal places to receive medical care, as the quality of care given by such centers often rivals that of the emergency room. After all, less than 5% of all cases seen in an urgent care center first will ever need to be transferred to a local ER.

If you’re looking to get comprehensive medical care, there are many places you’ll be able to find it, from your general care practitioner’s office to your local emergency room or urgent care clinic. Even the online doctor, the virtual doctor, has become more present in our lives than ever before. Frequenting an online doctor can, after all, be hugely helpful and allowing you to make more informed decisions about your medical care and next steps that you will take.